FIPP’s President & CEO James Hewes To Samir “Mr. Magazine™” Husni: “I Wonder If 2018 Might Be The First Year Where Things Start To Show Signs Of Recovery.” The Mr. Magazine™ Interview…

January 4, 2018

“I think it’s going to be a pretty good year, actually. It’s funny you know, ever since I took this job I’ve been hearing more and more people telling me about the resurgence of print magazines and how print magazines are coming back as a medium, and I think 2018 might be the year when you start to see some signs of that filtering through into the numbers, because, obviously, the numbers that are released by the publishing companies have been pretty bad in 2017.” James Hewes

“FIPP, the network for global media, is dedicated to improving all aspects of the media content industry through the sharing of quality content to audiences of interest. FIPP exists to help its members develop better strategies and build better businesses by identifying and communicating emerging trends, sharing knowledge, and improving skills, worldwide.”

James Hewes is CEO of FIPP and believes that the organization’s number one mission is to its members and its prospective members by ensuring that it answers their needs and reflects their interests across all platforms, including print, where its roots lay. James is a firm believer in print, but also in the multiplatform outlets that exist in this digital age, and thinks that quite possibly 2018 may be the year where magazines and magazine media start to show signs of recovery in all aspects of the business.

I spoke with James recently via Skype and we talked about his vision for FIPP. In the short time he has been CEO (he was appointed president and CEO last summer), he said that since he took the job, he’s had more and more people tell him that the resurgence of print magazines is strong and that print, as a medium, is on the upswing. This of course is music to Mr. Magazine’s™ ears, and I hope to yours also, and is something that makes James think 2018 may be the year of the magazine. From James’ mouth to the magazine cosmoses ears.

I think you’ll find that the conversation we had was both informative and inspirational, across all platforms, not just print. But I believe it just goes to prove yet again, that in the 21st century, in 2018, there’s room for everyone’s preference, print and digital. Wouldn’t you agree?

And now the Mr. Magazine™ interview with James Hewes, president and CEO, FIPP.

But first the sound-bites:

On how he sees magazines and magazine media shaping up for 2018: I think it’s going to be a pretty good year, actually. It’s funny you know, ever since I took this job I’ve been hearing more and more people telling me about the resurgence of print magazines and how print magazines are coming back as a medium, and I think 2018 might be the year when you start to see some signs of that filtering through into the numbers, because obviously the numbers that are released by the publishing companies have been pretty bad in 2017. The readership figures are down, circulation figures are down and advertising figures are down. But I wonder if 2018 might be the first year where things start to show signs of recovery, because there are certainly some signs that for the quality magazines and for the specialist magazines in particular, that their feeling as businesses and their feeling as brands is that they’re still quite positive about the future.

On whether he thinks magazines will strive to be more of a brand than an entity in 2018: Of course, that’s going to continue and that’s going to be the center of the strategy for most magazine companies for many years to come, I believe. I think it’s just that we’re starting to see some changes in emphasis now perhaps in some businesses. And specifically on digital and the digital publishing industry; it’s going to be interesting to see how 2018 plays out with respect to digital advertising. Toward the end of this year there has been an enormous amount of press coverage of the lack of trust in digital advertising and the problems that seem to be existing in the supply chain of digital advertising.

On where he sees the bright spots and the challenges globally when it comes to magazine media: It’s been pretty clear in 2017 that the U.K., the U.S. and the Western markets have had a tough time. The numbers coming out of those markets don’t look very good. You’ve got the feeling that 2018 can’t be as bad a year as 2017 was, so perhaps that constitutes a bright spot now. In terms of where there are real opportunities for growth, I think we still have to understand the market a lot better than we do right now. I think there’s still probably a fairly vibrant industry happening in Southeast Asia for print. Traditionally, it was always a region in the world where print did very well; where advertisers responded very strongly to print products and I think that’s probably still the case.

On whether he thinks publishing companies merging, such as Meredith buying Time Inc., is a worldwide model for the future or just a United States thing: No, I think that’s very much going to continue and I think there’s probably a bit more consolidation to come in the market. But interestingly, as companies consolidate, so it seems to be that they throw off new opportunities. I mean, yes, we may have lost one company with the merger of Meredith and Time Inc., but we’ve gained one of course, which is Time Inc. in the U.K., which will become a separate company, a separate publishing company with its own stable of brands.

On Mr. Magazine™ and the MPA hosting The Launch of the Year at the American Magazine Awards this year: That’s a really good initiative and the kind of thing we should be supporting. I went to the PPA’s (Professional Publishers Association) event in Scotland recently and they had put onto the agenda slots between every major speaking slot for somebody to come and present their new magazine. And in Scotland alone, there were six, seven, eight, nine, ten fantastic new magazine ideas from incredibly passionate, usually very young people, very passionate about their subject. And totally committed to print, so it was great to see.

On the biggest challenge that he thinks FIPP will face in the future: I think the biggest challenge for FIPP is the same as the challenge for the industry. I mean, we are an organization that has its roots in print and we must never forget that print will always be 50 percent of what we do; 50 percent plus of what we do, because that’s what the industry is all about. But the challenge is how do we reflect the move toward multiplatform brand management in our memberships and in our services; how do we ensure that the other areas of publishing businesses, which are very important to them and should be very important to us, digital publishing and digital media, and events, events in particular; how do we ensure that they’re represented in what we do?

On what has been the most pleasant moment so far: I think I would say two things. The first is the incredible dedication and commitment of the staff that we have here at FIPP. When I joined we were one month away from putting on the World Congress, which you know very well is a very large event with 600-700 people from the publishing industry, including some very senior individuals. So, to have a change in CEO running up to that event could have potentially been very disruptive. It wasn’t disruptive at all, because we’ve got a fantastic team who totally know their jobs and just went off and did it, almost without my involvement. It was great, and executed a fantastic event.

On how FIPP can get publishing businesses that are competing for similar audiences to work together: Well, I think that’s a great question, because it’s something that we as an industry have not been very good at historically. Even the newspaper industry, which traditionally was very much comprised of companies fighting almost to the death with one another, have been a little bit more unified in their approach to the challenges of the digital age and the big platforms, than the magazine industry has. So, I think that’s something that would I see as a very big part of FIPP’s remix, to help magazine companies and print companies to work better together.

On whether he believes that unifying voice between companies is possible: Anything is possible. (Laughs) I hope it’s possible. I think there’s a great danger for us as an industry that we present a fragmented voice to those platforms, because we are not, individually as companies, even though we have very, very large individual members, individually as companies, compared to the scale of a Google or a Facebook, we’re still relatively insignificant. And I think it’s only by providing the combined muscle of our audience together as an industry, that we can really start to get some of the things that we want.

On the status of newsstand and single-copy sales: Single-copy sales for me remains a great missed opportunity in a lot of markets. It’s interesting, I was reading a piece recently about Bauer in the U.S., and it may have even been from yourself, talking about the success that they’ve had on the newsstand in the U.S. And that’s really because they’ve taken the lessons they learned in Germany, where newsstand is an actually predominant distribution method, and applied them to their relatively neglected U.S. market, and have had a huge amount of success.

On whether he thinks magazines and magazine media can ever go back to the powerhouse it was once: If you’re thinking about pure volume; are we ever going to sell as many copies as we once did? No, and I think that’s not necessarily a bad thing. A lot of the copy sales in the market as you know were driven by very general lifestyle magazines or entertainment magazines, both men’s and women’s, generally weeklies, of course, there are some monthlies. They have content that has migrated entirely to the Internet and that’s probably never going to come back. And those were very high margin businesses, very profitable businesses for most companies. And that’s where I think a lot of this misunderstanding about the death of magazines comes from; the idea that just because you’ve lost your largest, most profitable category your industry as a whole is destroyed, but it’s not.

On anything else he’d like to add: Only to say what I have been saying consistently throughout my first few months here, which is that I fervently believe that this is the most exciting time in history to be working in this industry. From the outside looking in, people may think it’s crazy, why would someone go and work in the publishing industry generally, and I’m not just talking about print, but publishing in media generally. And I say to them, are you crazy? This is an absolutely fantastic time to be working in it.

On what someone would find him doing if they showed up unexpectedly one evening at his home: Probably playing with my children; I have two young children, eight-years-old and 10-years-old. And I don’t get a chance to spend a lot of time with them, because I travel so much with my job. So, when I’m home I try to make sure that I spend as much time as possible with them and with my wife, Sheena, because we’re away from each other a lot and it’s nice to be reunited.

On what he would have tattooed upon his brain that would be there forever and no one could ever forget about him: I would hope that they would say that I always tried to solve problems. I’ve kind of made a career out of being a guide that people go to when they have a problem and they need to solve it. Yes, he was a problem-solver.

On what keeps him up at night: What keeps me up at night is actually probably not work. It’s just how do I make sure that my children get the best start in life; how do they get the best education; how do they get all of the opportunities that I was fortunate enough to have when I was growing up? The world today is a very different place from what it was when I was growing up and in some ways, a lot scarier place. Certainly, a lot harder place to grow up in. And so my focus is very much on making sure that they get the great start in life that they need.

And now the lightly edited transcript of the Mr. Magazine™ interview with James Hewes, CEO, FIPP.

Samir Husni: Congratulations are in order for heading the largest magazine and magazine media association in the world.

James Hewes: Thank you; I’m very privileged.

Samir Husni: It’s a big task, I’m sure. So, how do you envision 2018 shaping up for magazines and magazine media?

James Hewes: I think it’s going to be a pretty good year, actually. It’s funny you know, ever since I took this job I’ve been hearing more and more people telling me about the resurgence of print magazines and how print magazines are coming back as a medium, and I think 2018 might be the year when you start to see some signs of that filtering through into the numbers, because obviously the numbers that are released by the publishing companies have been pretty bad in 2017. The readership figures are down, circulation figures are down and advertising figures are down.

But I wonder if 2018 might be the first year where things start to show signs of recovery, because there are certainly some signs that for the quality magazines and for the specialist magazines in particular, that their feeling as businesses and their feeling as brands is that they’re still quite positive about the future. They’re still seeing reasonably good numbers, in terms of circulation and advertising, and even some areas of growth. So, I think 2018 could be a very good year, hopefully, for the print business.

Samir Husni: What about the venturing of magazines from print into digital and that mix? Do you see magazine companies doing more of that; magazines becoming more of a brand, rather than an entity?

James Hewes: Of course, that’s going to continue and that’s going to be the center of the strategy for most magazine companies for many years to come, I believe. I think it’s just that we’re starting to see some changes in emphasis now perhaps in some businesses. And specifically on digital and the digital publishing industry; it’s going to be interesting to see how 2018 plays out with respect to digital advertising.

Toward the end of this year there has been an enormous amount of press coverage of the lack of trust in digital advertising and the problems that seem to be existing in the supply chain of digital advertising. Recently, there was a piece suggesting that some big organizations were losing as much as two and a half million dollars a day or a week to fraud. With those kinds of numbers it’s easy to see why people don’t trust the digital advertising supply chain anymore.

So, 2018 might be the year when that really comes to a head; that doesn’t feel like it can continue in its current form. I don’t think that will stop magazine companies from going into the digital space though, because it’s still a really important part of that brand wheel. And if you’re putting your brand at the center of your strategy, then digital does need to play a part in that.

There will still be brands that are exceptions, where print is still going to be the primary and sometimes the only reason for their existence or the only way in which they make money. I think about a brand like Private Eye here in the U.K., which is a very big print magazine, and has very expressly and strategically stayed away from digital in any sense over its entire lifespan and hasn’t done any harm to its circulation figures at all. So, there could be a few other examples of that which crop up in the years to come.

Samir Husni: As you scan the FIPP members all over the world, where do you see the bright spots; where do you see the challenging spots? Do you feel the U.K. will be leading; the Middle East; Asia; South America?

James Hewes: It’s been pretty clear in 2017 that the U.K., the U.S. and the Western markets have had a tough time. The numbers coming out of those markets don’t look very good. You’ve got the feeling that 2018 can’t be as bad a year as 2017 was, so perhaps that constitutes a bright spot now.

In terms of where there are real opportunities for growth, I think we still have to understand the market a lot better than we do right now. I think there’s still probably a fairly vibrant industry happening in Southeast Asia for print. Traditionally, it was always a region in the world where print did very well; where advertisers responded very strongly to print products and I think that’s probably still the case.

It’s difficult to put a kind of bright spot/dark spot analysis of the market by country though, because it will vary massively depending on the category you’re in. I would rather characterize it as the difference between general interest magazines versus specialist magazines. If you’re in a general lifestyle space, then you’re probably still going to have a tough time next year. I think the more specialist you are, whether that’s a specialist news brand or specialist interest brand, you’re going to do better, because those brands seem to be the ones that are winning at the moment.

Samir Husni: Do you see anything like we’re seeing in the United States, companies merging, such as Meredith buying Time Inc.; Hearst buying Rodale? Do you see that as a model for the future worldwide, or it’s just a United States thing?

James Hewes: No, I think that’s very much going to continue and I think there’s probably a bit more consolidation to come in the market. But interestingly, as companies consolidate, so it seems to be that they throw off new opportunities. I mean, yes, we may have lost one company with the merger of Meredith and Time Inc., but we’ve gained one of course, which is Time Inc. in the U.K., which will become a separate company, a separate publishing company with its own stable of brands.

We’re also finding, and I’m certainly noticing, that there is now an emerging ecosystem of publishing businesses at the small end have very often formed either people straight out of college, who previously would have gone into work for Time Inc., but are now doing their own thing, or they’re staffed by “X” publishing industry people who are creating new magazines and creating new publishing opportunities based around the fact that the big companies just aren’t there anymore; it’s fear of them.

So, while there’s a lot of consolidation at the top end, I think one of the things that we’re interested in exploring for 2018 is the extent to which that’s being filled at the bottom end by a host of new companies and startups that are: A – a lot more positive about the future of print in particular, but B – they don’t necessarily think in terms of those silos anymore when it comes to, I’m a print business; I’m a digital business. They’re just a business, and they’re interested in promoting usually their specialist interest content and specialist interest opportunities. And they just find the best way to do that.

Samir Husni: This year I’m doing The Launch of the Year with the MPA at the American Magazine Media Conference, where we will be celebrating new magazines. And this will be the first time in the history of the American Magazine Media Conference that this has been done in conjunction with the awards.

James Hewes: That’s a really good initiative and the kind of thing we should be supporting. I went to the PPA’s (Professional Publishers Association) event in Scotland recently and they had put onto the agenda slots between every major speaking slot for somebody to come and present their new magazine. And in Scotland alone, there were six, seven, eight, nine, ten fantastic new magazine ideas from incredibly passionate, usually very young people, very passionate about their subject. And totally committed to print, so it was great to see.

Samir Husni: In the short time that you’ve been heading FIPP, what has been the biggest challenge that you’ve had to face and how did you overcome it?

James Hewes: I think the biggest challenge for FIPP is the same as the challenge for the industry. I mean, we are an organization that has its roots in print and we must never forget that print will always be 50 percent of what we do; 50 percent plus of what we do, because that’s what the industry is all about. But the challenge is how do we reflect the move toward multiplatform brand management in our memberships and in our services; how do we ensure that the other areas of publishing businesses, which are very important to them and should be very important to us, digital publishing and digital media, and events, events in particular; how do we ensure that they’re represented in what we do?

We have a lot of members now who think of themselves as genuinely platform agnostic publishing businesses, and we have to be the same. A lot of them are now getting into the venture capital space, so they’re becoming investment businesses as well. Again, we have to represent those members to the fullest extent possible by offering them services to help them do better in venture capital and making investments.

So, it’s about that continuous process of adaptation, but I’ve been very clear with the team here, and I think I’ve been very clear with the membership that we must have print in our hearts and in our minds with everything that we do, because it is still: A – where we came from, and B – a very important and a very profitable part of our industry.

Samir Husni: And what has been the most pleasant moment so far?

James Hewes: I think I would say two things. The first is the incredible dedication and commitment of the staff that we have here at FIPP. When I joined we were one month away from putting on the World Congress, which you know very well is a very large event with 600-700 people from the publishing industry, including some very senior individuals. So, to have a change in CEO running up to that event could have potentially been very disruptive. It wasn’t disruptive at all, because we’ve got a fantastic team who totally know their jobs and just went off and did it, almost without my involvement. It was great, and executed a fantastic event.

I think the other very nice thing to have affirmed was the amount of good will that exists toward FIPP as an organization. I’ve been overwhelmed by the number of publishing companies and individuals in the publishing industry who, completely unsolicited, would message me and congratulate me on my appointment, but also just affirm their commitment to FIPP as an organization that they think is important for the industry. And at the end of the day we rely on the goodwill of our members to exist. We provide them services and we provide them with products and we want to be of value to them, but we also want to have that recommendation going on, that they say to their colleagues and their fellow businesses, look, this is an organization that is valuable to us and you should be members too. So, it’s great to see that goodwill in action.

Samir Husni: One of the problems that I always hear about with the magazine industry as a whole, worldwide, is that these are competing companies; these are businesses that are competing for similar audiences in most cases; how can you get them to work together?

Jaes Hewes: Well, I think that’s a great question, because it’s something that we as an industry have not been very good at historically. Even the newspaper industry, which traditionally was very much comprised of companies fighting almost to the death with one another, have been a little bit more unified in their approach to the challenges of the digital age and the big platforms, than the magazine industry has. So, I think that’s something that would I see as a very big part of FIPP’s remix, to help magazine companies and print companies to work better together.

It seems to me that there’s a good opportunity to do that around the dialogue that we want to have with the big platforms, particularly with Facebook and Google. And if FIPP can be the unifying force that brings those companies together and provides that common voice for all of the industry, then great, that’s really what we’re here to do.

Samir Husni: Do you think that’s possible?

James Hewes: Anything is possible. (Laughs)

Samir Husni: (Laughs too).

James Hewes: I hope it’s possible. I think there’s a great danger for us as an industry that we present a fragmented voice to those platforms, because we are not, individually as companies, even though we have very, very large individual members, individually as companies, compared to the scale of a Google or a Facebook, we’re still relatively insignificant. And I think it’s only by providing the combined muscle of our audience together as an industry, that we can really start to get some of the things that we want.

On the flipside, the good news is those companies are willing to listen. We had Facebook speaking at the Congress and they were pretty clear that they’re now in listening mode; they want to hear what the industry has to say, and they’re trying their best to respond. But I think it’s hard for them to respond if we’re speaking with 100 voices. We need to speak with one or two voices.

Samir Husni: One of our American publishers, Topix Media Labs, have imported the cover mounts. I interviewed CEO & co-founder, Tony Romando, recently and this is his way of reinventing the bookazine. Many European publishers tell me all of the time that they want to find a way to lose the cover mounts. What is the status at the newsstands; what do you feel, in the U.K. and globally, is the status of single-copy sales?

James Hewes: Single-copy sales for me remains a great missed opportunity in a lot of markets. It’s interesting, I was reading a piece recently about Bauer in the U.S., and it may have even been from yourself, talking about the success that they’ve had on the newsstand in the U.S. And that’s really because they’ve taken the lessons they learned in Germany, where newsstand is an actually predominant distribution method, and applied them to their relatively neglected U.S. market, and have had a huge amount of success.

I would like to think that there are still opportunities in most markets for that to happen, but of course, we’re fighting at the same time with retailers that are themselves struggling and that are themselves shrinking floor space and focusing their attention on the most profitable items or the most profitable per space, per square meter items.

So, again, it comes to this question of unity and I think it’s no coincidence that the markets that have had the most unified approach to newsstand have been the ones that have had the most success.

In the large, established markets, can you still go out there and make a big splash at newsstand? I think you can. I think it’s expensive; it’s not as much of a priority as it once was. In the emerging markets, that opportunity is probably gone. It was probably there for a brief period a number of years ago, but it’s not there anymore. It’s a pity, because I do think newsstand was a great missed opportunity.

And on that question about cover mounts; I worked a number of years at the BBC, and BBC magazines, which had a very large children’s publishing division and relied on cover mounts for a lot of its marketing activity. And one of the messages that we’re getting about the print industry in particular is that children’s publishing is actually a growth area, something that’s really thriving. And that the very clever and very targeted cover mounts strategy remains a part of that. So, if you’re creating cover mounts that are educationally-focused with that bit of fun element to them for children, you can still use those as a very effective tool for marketing for children’s magazines.

Samir Husni: At my ACT Experience that will take place in April, half of one day is going to be devoted to distribution and the folks from the Newsgroup, which is the largest wholesaler, if not the only major wholesaler left in America. They will be leading that group with some retailers. So, as the industry has changed, and as you mentioned earlier, 2018 is shaping up to be better than 2017; do you think that we can ever go back to where the magazine and magazine media industry used to be? Sort of like the powerhouse it once was in the media sphere?

James Hewes: I would answer that question in a number of different ways. If you’re thinking about pure volume; are we ever going to sell as many copies as we once did? No, and I think that’s not necessarily a bad thing. A lot of the copy sales in the market as you know were driven by very general lifestyle magazines or entertainment magazines, both men’s and women’s, generally weeklies, of course, there are some monthlies. They have content that has migrated entirely to the Internet and that’s probably never going to come back. And those were very high margin businesses, very profitable businesses for most companies.

And that’s where I think a lot of this misunderstanding about the death of magazines comes from; the idea that just because you’ve lost your largest, most profitable category your industry as a whole is destroyed, but it’s not.

I think where we will see an increase in influence and where influence will remain persistent for magazines is in those quality journalism spaces; where magazines will continue to have a presence in reader’s hands and in households; where magazines will still have a really important voice and will serve a really influential voice. I’m always reluctant to use Donald Trump as an example, but when the president of the United States Tweets about wanting to be on the cover of a magazine in 2017, that’s still quite an important factor in people’s lives. And I think that influence will persist for quite some time yet.

Samir Husni: Is there anything else that you’d like to add?

James Hewes: Only to say what I have been saying consistently throughout my first few months here, which is that I fervently believe that this is the most exciting time in history to be working in this industry. From the outside looking in, people may think it’s crazy, why would someone go and work in the publishing industry generally, and I’m not just talking about print, but publishing in media generally. And I say to them, are you crazy? This is an absolutely fantastic time to be working in it, because publishing companies are now exposed to such a broad range, a huge variety, of business areas that in the old days you would never, ever have gotten exposure to, whether that’s e-commerce or social media or social influences, whatever you want to think of, as a new business area that they’ve gone into.

And at the same time, we get to play with magazines, which are really fun and really a fantastic industry in their own right. So, all I would say is this is an incredibly great industry and I’m still really excited to be a part of it.

I started my working life at Barclays Bank, and I worked for Barclay’s Bank for four years. And I was very lucky; I met my wife there, so it wasn’t a wasted opportunity by any means. But I got to about three years working there, I was 22 or 23, and I thought if I don’t do something now, I’m going to be stuck in this institution for the rest of my life. And so I sat down and wrote on a piece of paper, asking myself what I really wanted to do with my life? And I answered work in the media and these are the companies that I want to work for.

And the first company on the list was the BBC. And I was very lucky, in the next week in the newspapers there was a job listed at the BBC, in the big national newspaper, seen by everybody in the country. I applied and I got the job out of a lot of applicants. And I punched the air when I got the job, because I knew then that I was going to be doing something that I loved, rather than just doing a job. So, when people come to me for career advice, which they’re starting to do now, I go to universities and lecture a bit, I tell them the same thing: just do what you love to do. Don’t just do something because it pays the bills. That’s worked for me so far.

Samir Husni: If I showed up unexpectedly at your home one evening after work, what would I find you doing? Having a glass of wine; reading a magazine; cooking; watching TV; or something else?

James Hewes: Probably playing with my children; I have two young children, eight-years-old and 10-years-old. And I don’t get a chance to spend a lot of time with them, because I travel so much with my job. So, when I’m home I try to make sure that I spend as much time as possible with them and with my wife, Sheena, because we’re away from each other a lot and it’s nice to be reunited.

Samir Husni: If you could have one thing tattooed upon your brain that no one would ever forget about you, what would it be?

James Hewes: (Laughs) That’s a really tough question. I should have known you were going to ask this question, because you ask it to everybody. (Laughs again) That’s a brilliant question, because the one answer you can’t say is modesty. (Laughs)

Samir Husni: (Laughs too).

James Hewes: I would hope that they would say that I always tried to solve problems. I’ve kind of made a career out of being a guide that people go to when they have a problem and they need to solve it. Yes, he was a problem-solver.

Samir Husni: My typical last question; what keeps you up at night?

James Hewes: What keeps me up at night is actually probably not work. It’s just how do I make sure that my children get the best start in life; how do they get the best education; how do they get all of the opportunities that I was fortunate enough to have when I was growing up? The world today is a very different place from what it was when I was growing up and in some ways, a lot scarier place. Certainly, a lot harder place to grow up in. And so my focus is very much on making sure that they get the great start in life that they need.